Drawing as a Tool to Understand Sensory and Motor Contributions to Memory

Creating drawings of information can provide elaborative, pictorial, and motor cues that enhance later memory retrieval—but the relative contributions of these cues, and how they interact, remain poorly understood. To isolate the mechanisms underlying drawing’s effectiveness as a mnemonic tool, we developed a task battery compatible with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that systematically manipulates the presence or absence of these information sources. For instance, beyond standard drawing, participants completed tasks such as drawing “without ink” to test the role of visual feedback, and tracing to assess the contribution of elaborative processing. To examine the role of motor information, we used robot-guided movements to reinstate participants’ motor activity from encoding during later retrieval. Across these experiments and preliminary fMRI data, our findings highlight the critical role of motor information—but only when integrated with visual and, especially, elaborative cues. These results suggest that multimodal integration during encoding is fundamental to drawing’s power as a memory tool.